A reference made by a Russian official to the Holocaust on Thursday has been condemned by a leading US-based Jewish human rights group.

In response to a Washington Post report about concerns over the presence of a photographer from the Russian state-owned Tass news agency at Wednesday’s White House meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a spokesperson for Lavrov reportedly said the paper was “making our correspondents feel like Jews in 1933.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper — associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles — told The Algemeiner on Friday that the Russian official’s words left him “almost speechless.”

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Cooper continued, “To put it in context, I offer the famous Russian joke told furtively during the Communist dictatorship in Soviet Union. The two official newspapers were the Communist party’s Pravda (truth) and the Soviet government’s Isvestia (news). The joke was this — there is no pravda (truth) in Isvestia (news) and no isvestia (news) in Pravda!”

“Despite the demise of the Soviet Union, Lavrov’s antics confirm that some things in Russia never change,” Cooper concluded.